The potato disease in 1845 led to the emigration of a million Irish to the United States within the space of five years. Potatoes are also a staple food in Galicia. Yet when they were first introduced, the people, in their ignorance, refused point blank to grow them. There is hardly a family in Galicia, however poor, that does not possess at least one cow. When the animal begins to grow old they fatten it with maize and potatoes, and sell it to the butcher. The extreme humidity of the climate produces such abundant pasture that the keep of cattle amounts to very little. The people of Galicia have been cattle breeders from time immemorial,--in fact, this was until the last century the popular industry of the province, and many hundred head of cattle were annually exported from Coruña to London. The Count of Campomanes, in a lecture on the subject in the thirties of last century, spoke of the Gallegans as model cattle breeders.[196] Why has this industry died out? Failde attributes its decline to the fact that the United States now export such fabulous quantities of fresh, salted, and tinned meat into Great Britain, and sell them at the lowest possible prices, that British industries of that class are no longer a paying concern. It is more than probable that if the British Government were to put a small tax on all American imports of that nature, England would again preserve her own beef, and be glad once more to trade in live cattle with Galicia. Why should Chicago workmen pickle beef for English tables, while Englishmen parade our streets for want of employment, and Gallegan cattle breeders emigrate to South America to evade starvation? Portugal has recently put a prohibitive tax of fourteen pesetas per head on all cattle imported into that country from Spain, and a period of renewed depression has resulted in Galicia, for even half that sum would exclude the poor Gallegan peasants from the market. In central Galicia it is customary for all the peasants to breed mules. At the age of a year and a half they used, formerly, to sell the female for about 12,000 reals, and the male for half that price. But mules are now being introduced from France, and they are also being extensively bred in Andalusia and Estremadura, so that this industry has been killed in Galicia.